


Wibbly Wobbly

by moonix



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Doctor Who Fusion, And a stowaway, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Matchmaker TARDIS, Tea and biscuits and space chess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28531614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: Doctor Who AU in which Neil is the Doctor, Andrew is the Master, and they could both use some company while travelling time and space.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 29
Kudos: 214





	Wibbly Wobbly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [likearecord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likearecord/gifts).



> Mandicakes! This one's for you. I apologise profusely because it is not, as suggested, 100k, and very rather cobbled together in stolen moments with the help of 5+ year out of date Doctor Who knowledge. As its title suggests: it is a bit (a lot) wibbly wobbly. But I hope you enjoy it anyways. <3

“It’s Neil now,” the Doctor says.

“Andrew,” the Master replies reluctantly.

-

Some people—Neil’s companions among them—would call it a trap. Or, perhaps, a victory, if they weren’t around for some of the Master’s more collaterally damaging schemes.

Neil isn’t sure what to call it yet. For now, he settles on the exchange of one form of eternal imprisonment and torture for another, the unknown evil for the slightly lesser known evil. He doesn’t look too closely at the fact that the Master—this Master, _Andrew_ —called him for help. Or perhaps not help. Perhaps just the slow, inevitable draw of two magnets that have been circling each other since the beginning of time.

He’s not stupid, of course. He keeps Andrew contained to the recreation level of the TARDIS and doesn’t tell him where or when they are, puts an isomorphic lock on the console and doesn’t let anyone else inside—lucky he was between companions when the Master’s call came in. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t _need_ to sleep, strictly speaking, but he’s got rather used to it, and there’s a lovely spot for cat-napping in the greenhouse on level XY-9 that he favours.

Still.

He needs to be alert. He needs to be present, focused, prepared-

“You know, playing laser tag all by yourself is not very fun.”

Neil nearly yanks out a crucial wire in his haste to scramble out from underneath the console. Andrew is leaning against the doorway to the main wardrobe, loose and relaxed but with danger coiled underneath. He looks like he’s been there for a while.

“How did you get up here?” Neil asks, shoving wires back into the console at random. Andrew tilts his head and hums.

“Your TARDIS likes me.”

“She does not!” Neil huffs indignantly, and maybe slams the console shut with a little more force than necessary.

Andrew just shrugs and looks around with dull curiosity in his gaze, a blunt knife thinking idly about cutting.

“Chess, too,” he says after a moment.

“What?”

“Not very fun with just one player.”

“Okay, first of all, I saved your ass,” Neil says, crossing his arms and remembering too late that they are stained with grease and fluids and he’s wearing his favourite shirt. “And second of all, I have really good Yelp reviews.”

“Three from Captain Matt Boyd and one from an entity that calls itself Big Bob, comes from Croydon, and gave you two stars for pointing him to a good kebab place that was still open when he knocked on your door by mistake one night after drinking to excess.”

“It was a good kebab place,” Neil says. Andrew smirks, like he somehow won, and Neil bristles and wipes his hands on his trousers and looks around. “I’m taking you back to your room.”

“My cell, you mean,” Andrew says.

“Is it a cell if you walked into it willingly?” Neil asks, absent-mindedly, as he gathers up tools and puts them down in a different place. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, you also somehow managed to walk out of it.”

Andrew waves a hand like that was easy. It shouldn’t be—there’s nothing that connects the different levels of the TARDIS to each other unless Neil says so, and even then it’s a gamble on whether it’ll be a staircase, a shuttle, an elevator, a laundry chute, a tunnel, or whatever else the TARDIS feels like coming up with that day. Neil has fond memories of the time it was a diving board into a ball pit.

He tries to imagine Andrew in a ball pit and snorts.

As they walk down the corridor, Neil allows himself to pay attention to the Master’s current body for the first time. He is short—but then he is always short, just like Neil, who has long since accepted it as some sort of cosmic joke. Messy blond hair, not even deliberately messy this time, just messy like he rolled out of bed and couldn’t be bothered. Broad shoulders, soft-looking skin, a mole on the back of his neck which is pinkening like a sunrise-

“Staring,” Andrew grits out.

“Oh? Am I bothering you?” Neil grins.

“Always.”

“How did it happen?” Neil asks, merriment sapping out of him as he remembers his last regeneration. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked. It is a private thing, regenerating.

Andrew doesn’t answer. It must have been recent; Neil could smell it on him when he got him out, that slightly singed, new-book scent clinging to him. Maybe it even happened just before the TARDIS scooped him up.

Another jolly memory: the look on Andrew’s face as he sputtered out of the swimming pool, sopping wet and furious. Not Neil’s fault he ended up in there, he just told the TARDIS where to scoop him up, head still brimming with the Master’s distress.

“Why did you call me?” Neil asks as they wait for today’s shuttle. The display is still unscrambling itself, then slowly spits out an arbitrary arrival time that could be anywhere between two minutes or two days from now. Neil sits down on the couch in the waiting area and is pleased when a tray pops up, bearing sandwiches, tea and thick slabs of chocolate fudge cake that Neil is pretty sure he picked up in a Waitrose last time he was on Earth and then lost track of.

The TARDIS fridge is, of course, bigger on the inside.

“As opposed to one of the thousands of other Time Lords left in the universe?” Andrew drawls, going immediately for the cake.

“I just mean,” Neil says, picking up a sandwich and putting it down again. He frowns. “You know.”

Andrew looks at him, and Neil is hit with a nausea-swell of homesickness, even though he’s right here. The Master’s eyes are always the same. Different shapes and colours, sure, but at the heart of them there is a sameness that echoes bleakly into every crevice of Neil’s soul, that he couldn’t hide if he tried.

Neil would recognise him anywhere, any time.

He’s the only living being in the whole of time and space that still smells like home.

Maybe there’s his answer.

They finish the sandwiches and the cake and the tea, and then the shuttle rolls into the platform, and Neil sends Andrew on his way and suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself.

-

Andrew continues to escape his cell— _room_ —and Neil stops jumping every time he shows up in his general vicinity. He never comes very close, but he’s always hanging out on the same level as Neil, watching and waiting and, occasionally, making a sarcastic comment on whatever Neil is doing at the moment.

They play laser tag. And chess.

Neil usually wins the former, Andrew the latter, but it’s a close call every time.

They spend a lot of time suspended in the vortex, because Neil doesn’t trust Andrew around civilization. He still doesn’t know what to do with him in the long term, but it’s not like they don’t have time. Every once in a while Andrew tries to sweet-talk the console into taking them somewhere, but the TARDIS’ fondness for him only goes so far, and Andrew doesn’t seem to be trying very hard anyway.

“Earth, 2020,” Andrew says, draped over a chaiselongue that fills Neil with an itching feeling of déjà-vu because he can’t for the life of him remember where he picked it up.

“Oh, no,” Neil says. “We don’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“If you don’t already know, I won’t tell you. Might give you ideas.”

“Hmm,” Andrew hums, smirking, and taps lazily at the multi-dimensional chessboard. “I win.”

“What? No you don’t.”

“Sure I do. Apocalyptic rider eats sentient teapot if the player has three robot sharks. I have three robot sharks, which means I can decapitate your fox queen.”

“Only when Mercury is in retrograde,” Neil scowls.

“Mars,” Andrew corrects. “It’s in the rulebook, look it up if you don’t believe me.”

“We still haven’t found the rulebook,” Neil points out. “I want a rematch.”

Andrew sighs and heaves himself upright.

“Fine. But I call dibs on the last crumpet.”

-

“This is a bad idea,” Neil says, crossing his legs and leaning back on his hands.

“Very,” Andrew agrees, though his bravado pales in comparison to the white-knuckled way he’s clinging to the roof of the TARDIS.

“Oh, I forgot you don’t like heights,” Neil teases.

“Lucky you,” Andrew mutters.

“Fresh air, though,” Neil says, waving his arm around to encompass the glittering expanse of nothingness around them.

Andrew eyes him like he’s gone mad, and maybe he has. The distress call Andrew sent was somehow powerful enough to get through Neil’s mental walls, but beyond that he doesn’t actually know how to communicate like this anymore. It is possible Andrew is already in his head, has been since forever, and Neil just hasn’t noticed.

“Stop thinking,” Andrew growls.

“Does it annoy you?” Neil smirks, and thinks harder. Andrew just rolls his eyes and doesn’t relinquish his grip.

The stars flit around them like fireflies. Time simmers slowly on the hob of the universe.

Somewhere in the world, the sun rises.

-

“Who knows,” Andrew hums when Neil asks him when he’s going to try and take over the world again, because it’s been suspiciously long and the trap still hasn’t snapped shut.

They’re in the kitchen, both sitting on the counters, dangling their legs over the abyss that is the space between them, eating their way through a packet of digestives that Neil unearthed at the back of a cupboard. He needs to stock up soon. On biscuits and cake and also, hugs.

Sometimes the knowledge that he can visit Matt and Dan any time he wants to makes it harder to go. Sometimes he stays away for a long time.

Sometimes he misses Kevin so much it hurts.

“How’s your meta-crisis twin?” Neil asks.

Andrew narrows his eyes and doesn’t deign to reply. Still a sore subject, then.

Neil swings his legs and sips his tea and thinks about all the adventures they’ve had. Well, maybe not adventures, but Neil can’t think of a word that means “doing their best to get in the way of each other’s plans” in any of the languages he knows.

Andrew is inspecting his digestive like it might contain an explosive. Neil draws Gallifreyan symbols in the spilled coffee grounds on the counter, nonsense and expletives and his name.

“Stop that,” Andrew says when Neil starts writing Andrew’s name, and he stops.

Then he smiles, and starts again.

-

Renee is the first one Neil tells. After all, she was married to Andrew once, during that unfortunate year when he tried to take over Earth just to get Neil’s attention.

What he doesn’t expect, somehow, is for Renee to bring Allison along—or rather, Allison to bring herself along—who takes one look at Andrew and pulls a gun out of what must be a hidden pocket universe somewhere inside her improbably tight dress.

“Allison,” Renee says, putting her hand on top of Allison’s on top of the weapon.

Allison grits her teeth.

Andrew waits them out, leaning against a doorway and inspecting his fingernails. He’s raided the second wardrobe and is wearing a black pinstripe suit with such precision that it looks like it was tailored specifically for him (and maybe it was, who knows what Neil got up to on his last supply run, certainly not Neil) and an obscenely bright, gaudy tie with neon pop-art cats printed on it.

“He deserves it, just for that tie,” Allison mutters, but lowers the gun and lets it disappear into whatever otherdimensional trickery is going on with that dress.

They have tea.

Neil and Renee chitchat while Allison glares and Andrew rearranges the custard tarts into a pattern that makes sense only to him. The TARDIS has provided a set of four cups—one that matches Andrew’s hideous tie, one with angel wings that remind Neil uncomfortably of Weeping Angels, a gloriously orange one, and a monstrously large Starbucks tankard. Usually there’s a pair of wibbly-wobbly stripy mugs that Neil and Andrew use, but those are just for them.

“Why not just get a dog?” Allison blurts into an ongoing conversation about Earth politics and which colour Renee should paint her bedroom (“Orange,” Neil insists). She gestures at Andrew with her Starbucks mug. “If you wanted a pet, I know a good breeder.”

There’s a little silence, just a tiny, hard marble of one that bounces merrily across the checkerboard tiled floor and then scurries underneath the cupboard where the TARDIS keeps a secret stash of bottle caps, paperclips, toy mice, pens, bowties, single socks, teaspoons, spare shoelaces for Neil’s orange Converse, and the little strips of wax on Babybel cheese that come off first.

Neil would kill for a Babybel right now, but he stress-ate the last ones when he thought he’d misplaced Andrew for a frantic twenty-four hours just to find him curled up like a cat in a sunny patch in the back of the library.

“He’s the last Time Lord alive in the whole universe,” Neil says when the silence has found its spot under the cupboard and gone to sleep.

“So?” Allison huffs.

“So, he’s my responsibility.”

Andrew looks at him. Neil looks at Allison. Allison looks at Renee.

Renee looks at Andrew and smiles.

“And maybe you are his, too,” she suggests.

Andrew snorts and Neil jerks and tries to pass it off by waving his hand around aimlessly, before finally adjusting one of the custard tarts on the plate where it has slid out of alignment. Immediately, Andrew reaches out and pushes it back.

Renee is still smiling.

Allison looks like she wants to say something, so Neil takes the wayward custard tart and puts it in her hand with such vehemence that she has no other choice but to eat it.

“So,” Neil says brightly, “how’s Dan?”

Brave, wonderful Danielle. They had a good time, they really did. Neil misses all of his companions—there’s a needle in his hearts for every one of them he had to let go—but some have caused a little more damage than others. He could ask after Kevin, since Renee is keeping an eye on him, but then he’d have to sit there and listen to her answer and expose himself to the hole in him labelled Kevin Day.

So he doesn’t.

They finish the custard tarts and then Renee asks him if he wants to come along on an adventure, for old times’ sake, but Neil says he has laundry and ignores the look on Renee’s face and shoos them out into the lush garden surrounding Renee’s house and the rain that is pelting down.

-

The next time they sit on the roof of the TARDIS, watching yet another sunrise in yet another galaxy (because no matter where or when they are, those never get old), Neil fiddles with the laces on his Converse and says, “Do you miss it?”

“Do I miss what,” Andrew says.

Neil shrugs.

“Freedom, I guess. Going places.”

“We are rarely not going places,” Andrew points out, taking a sip of hot cocoa.

“Yeah, but,” Neil says. “You’re still cooped up in there.”

He pats the TARDIS fondly and the box vibrates a little under his hand like a purr. Andrew looks at him like he’s the dumbest thing he’s ever encountered in his life, which is how he looks at Neil most of the time.

“Remember that time I was going to destroy your favourite planet?” he asks.

“Well,” Neil says.

He remembers the ticking of the clock in Andrew’s head. The moment when it finally stopped.

The moment he thought he’d finally got through to the good in the Master’s hearts, just for him to push him off that rooftop.

“You haven’t killed me yet,” Neil says, knocking his knuckles against the TARDIS as if to dispel bad luck. “What changed?”

Andrew looks at him, looks at the sunrise.

“Nothing,” he says.

-

“So this is what you do,” Andrew says, looking around with an expression of abject distaste.

“Yep,” Neil says cheerfully, waving his sonic screwdriver at the advancing hordes. “This is what I do.”

-

After narrowly escaping—and, okay, maybe Andrew deserves some of the credit for that—they get cups of milky tea and a packet of jammy dodgers and some blankets and sit in the empty bathtub in the back of the wardrobe that has been there since Neil can remember, too exhausted to care that their legs are getting mixed up.

“Dan?” Andrew asks.

“Rescued her from a mob of murderous Christmas trees,” Neil chuckles. “And then she rescued the world from a Dalek invasion. Very competent woman. She runs UNIT after Wymack retires.”

Andrew snorts and shoves another biscuit in his mouth. He looks good—flushed and frizzy, his tie askew. The fresh air has loosened him up.

Neil bumps his knee against Andrew’s and tells him about the others, socked toes wriggling against the arch of Andrew’s foot.

“What about you? Any partners in crime, other than Renee?”

“Renee shot me,” Andrew says sourly, rubbing the spot on his chest where the bullet went through like it still hurts, even though that was at least one regeneration ago. Neil waves his hand and Andrew dunks his biscuit in his tea and scowls. “Nicky,” he finally says. “He… attached himself to me.”

Neil nods. He knows how that goes.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” Andrew says, shrugging, dunking his biscuit with more vehemence. “He met a guy, settled down. I dumped Aaron on him.”

“Aaron?”

“My not-so-evil doppelgänger.”

“Ah, meta-crisis twin,” Neil says, licking his finger and picking up the last crumbs. “Do you visit them sometimes?”

Andrew grunts. Neither of them mention Kevin. Neil starts a footsie war by accident (or maybe design) and then they make more tea and then Neil discovers that they’ve picked up a stowaway—a raggedy tortoiseshell cat, hiding in a nest of scarves in the second wardrobe.

“She probably followed us when we were running from those things,” Neil says, peering at her. “Or maybe she’s been here since the last time I went grocery shopping. Let’s give her some milk.”

“Don’t you know anything,” Andrew says, clucking his tongue. “Cats shouldn’t have lactose.”

“Well, fine,” Neil huffs. “You do the shopping, then.”

-

When Andrew hasn’t returned after half an hour, Neil has to admit he might have made a mistake in letting him out of the TARDIS and out of his sight. He didn’t take them to Earth—he’s not _that_ stupid—and the planet, while Earth-adjacent enough to have things cats can safely eat, is one of the most profoundly boring places in the universe Neil has ever stumbled on. He foolishly thought if given the choice, Andrew would surely pick the varied delights of Neil and his TARDIS over being stuck here.

But a cell is still a cell, even if Neil has been lax with the keys.

He contemplates letting the cat out, guiltily remembers the many ways that setting a non-native organism loose in a novel environment can backfire, and drums his fingers on the console. Maybe he should just go—go somewhere he’s never been, meet some new people, forget about all this. It was never going to last anyway, was it?

Except, he doesn’t.

He grabs a jacket from the wardrobe—butter soft leather, scuffed at the elbows; he thinks it may have even belonged to some previous iteration of the Master at some point—and braves the drizzly grey day outside.

-

“Is this going to be a habit?” Neil asks, stepping up to the bars of the actual prison cell Andrew has landed himself in.

“In my defence,” Andrew says, “I thought the sign said free knives.”

-

They take the cat back to Earth, but she takes one horrified look at the snow-covered street outside and scurries back to her warm nest in the wardrobe, so Neil decides to keep her.

“We need a name,” he says, refilling the litterbox while Andrew watches and doesn’t offer to help.

“The Cat,” Andrew suggests dryly.

“She’s not a Time Lord,” Neil huffs, straightening and surveying his work. “Can you believe I’ve never had one?”

“A Time Lord?”

“A pet,” Neil says. “Don’t tell Allison.”

“I could have left,” Andrew says then without warning, gazing out at the warmly lit console room.

“You could have,” Neil agrees. He runs the sonic screwdriver along the outside of the litterbox, fastening it to the floor just in case they have a bumpy landing at some point.

Andrew doesn’t say anything for a long time. Eventually he wanders off, and Neil sits back on his haunches and looks at the cat, her long legs poking out of her nest.

In the end, he calls her Fish Finger.

-

“Pregnant,” Andrew says, disbelieving.

“Yup,” Neil says, gently feeling around Fish Finger’s belly. “Three or four of them, I think. Guess you could say she is… bigger on the inside.”

He laughs at his own joke. Fish Finger purrs and licks his hand, her small body warm and alive under his palm.

Andrew mutters a few choice swear words under his breath.

“What are we going to do?”

“I’ve delivered a few human babies in my time,” Neil says cheerfully. “How hard can it be?”

-

It’s Andrew who delivers Custard, Jammy Dodger, Gingersnap and Babybel, because Neil is out running errands and meeting Matt and Dan, who promptly follow him back to the TARDIS to look at the kittens and glare menacingly at Andrew. Since it’s hard to do both of those things at the same time, they take turns, Matt cooing over an exhausted but proud Fish Finger and the little ones while Dan glowers at a safe distance.

“Do you really think it’s wise?” Matt whispers, glancing behind himself at where Andrew is demonstratively juggling knives with a bored expression. “Have you considered it might be a-”

“Trap, yeah, I know,” Neil says. “He’s had more than enough opportunities by now, though. To be honest, I think he’s… tired.”

“Tired?”

Neil shrugs.

He doesn’t want to say any of the trite, hopeful things he’s been wondering lately, because he knows what that would sound like. Instead he picks up one of the kittens and says, “Want one? I could bring them back when they’re old enough.”

-

They give most of them away, except for Custard, who harbours a deep-seated adoration for Andrew and likes to sleep in the crook of his arm when they play chess.

-

Andrew kisses him.

They’re in the kitchen, making tea, and Andrew kisses him, and Neil squeezes the teabags in his hand so hard they burst.

“So that’s why,” he says weakly when Andrew is finished and inspecting his work with a smug expression. Neil’s mouth feels like a beehive, and he’s reasonably sure his hair looks like it just survived a minor tornado after what Andrew did with it.

“That’s why,” Andrew murmurs, low and satisfied, and leaves the room.

-

“Evil,” Neil gasps. “Villanous. Abhorrent. Vile. Unforgivable.”

“Tell me more,” Andrew hums, grinding down at an angle that makes Neil’s entire body buzz like freshly fallen snow under streetlights.

-

“Why?” Andrew asks, staring at the black beast of a car and the key in his hand and then the car again.

“Because you’re my responsibility,” Neil says, shoving his hands in his pockets and shuffling his feet.

“I thought it was destroyed,” Andrew murmurs, almost reverently. He runs his fingers over the gleaming black surface of the car.

“It was,” Neil shrugs. “I fixed it.”

Andrew looks at him. Custard is waiting in a transport box, mewling impatiently.

“I wasn’t able to restore all of the levels,” Neil admits. “It’s a bit small, but… it works. You can even go to Earth, 2020, if you really want to.”

Andrew takes his hand off his almost-brand-new TARDIS and unlocks the door. Neil watches as he gets in and doesn’t notice the cat carrier is still by his feet in the snow until after Andrew is gone.

He wraps his arms around his chest, shivering, and looks down at a sadly meeping Custard.

“Guess we both got dumped, huh?”

-

He does what he always does when he wants to punish himself, and goes to see Kevin.

-

Less than two days later, there’s a knock on the door.

Neil has parked his TARDIS on a planet that is supremely suited to moping—near constant rain, moody cities steeped in fog, a melancholy people and an abundance of gothic libraries full of sad poetry. He took Kevin here once and teased him endlessly about liking it, but Kevin doesn’t remember, just like he doesn’t remember any of the other places Neil took him or the people he saved or the time they got roaringly drunk with Shakespeare and Kevin accidentally gave him the idea for Hamlet.

Though he still has a certain fondness for Hamlet, according to Renee.

Neil sighs and thinks about scraping himself off the floor of the console room when the door swings open on its own accord and Andrew stalks in, hair plastered to his forehead and rain dripping from his coat.

“Oh,” Neil says, “hey.”

Both of his hearts are doing their best to turn into live birds and fly out of his chest.

“Hey,” Andrew mocks, crouching down beside him and prying the empty teacup from his grasp to sniff it.

“It’s just PG Tips,” Neil swears. “Though now that I think about it, the milk smelled a bit dodgy. Where’s your TARDIS?”

“Parked it,” Andrew says. “In Nicky’s garage.”

Neil pushes himself up on his elbows.

“Does Nicky know?”

Andrew just shrugs. He gets up and goes into the wardrobe, where Neil can hear the slap of wet clothes hitting the floor. When he emerges, he’s swaddled in an oversized black hoodie and a pair of dark green tartan sweatpants, and Custard is draped around his neck purring like his little life depends on it. Fish Finger is winding around his legs, doing her level best to trip him on the way to the kitchen.

The kettle clicks on.

Neil sits up slowly, trying not to scare away the moment.

Then Andrew sticks his head out of the door and says, “Where are we going next?”


End file.
